Thurston, Robert W. 1949–

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Thurston, Robert W. 1949–

PERSONAL: Born September 29, 1949, in Washington, DC; son of John H. (a political scientist and civil servant) and Alice S. (a community college president) Thurston; married Margaret C. Ziolowski (a professor), August 31, 1979; children: Alexander, Lara. Education: Northwestern University, B.A., 1971; University of Michigan, M.A., 1975, Ph.D., 1980. Hobbies and other interests: Golf, hiking, travel, music.

ADDRESSES: Home—211 North Ridge Drive, Oxford, OH 45056. Office—Department of History, Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056; fax: (513) 529-3224. E-mail—thurstrw@muohio.edu.

CAREER: University of Vermont, Burlington, visiting assistant professor, 1980–81; University of California, San Diego, visiting assistant professor, 1981–83; University of Texas, El Paso, assistant professor, 1983–87; Miami University, Oxford, OH, assistant professor, 1987–90, associate professor, 1990–96, professor of history, 1996–2004, Phillip R. Shriver professor of history, 2004–.

MEMBER: American Historical Association, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fellowships from Fulbright Program, American Philosophical Society, National Endowment for the Humanities, and International Research and Exchange Board.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

Liberal City, Conservative State: Moscow and Russia's Urban Crisis, 1906–1914, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1987.

Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934–1941, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1991.

(Editor, with Bernd Bonwetsch) The People's War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 2000.

Witch, Wicce, Mother Goose: The Rise and Fall of the Witch Hunts in Europe and North America, Longman (Harlow, England), 2001.

Contributor to books, including New Directions in Soviet History, edited by Stephen White, Cambridge University Press (London, England), 1991; and Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, edited by J. Arch Getty and Roberta Manning, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1993. Contributor to periodicals, including Chronicle of Higher Education, BBC History, Russian Review, Soviet Studies, and Politics and Society.

WORK IN PROGRESS: The Decline of Lynching in America: Murder, Culture, and Politics in Georgia, 1913–1921 and Salon to Solitude: Coffee and its Images in the West, 1600 to the Present.

SIDELIGHTS: Robert W. Thurston, a professor at Miami University, writes widely about European history. While much of his writing, such as Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934–1941 and Liberal City, Conservative State: Moscow and Russia's Urban Crisis, 1906–1914, focus on the former Soviet Union, in Witch, Wicce, Mother Goose: The Rise and Fall of the Witch Hunts in Europe and North America the author presents what Folklore contributor Jacqueline Simpson praised as a "broad and well-balanced" view of a "highly complex topic." Examining the history of witch trials and persecutions from medieval times through the seventeenth century. Noting that Thurston "takes the trouble to debunk popular myths, such as the view of witch-hunting as a deliberate attack on women," English Historical Review contributor Julian Goodare dubbed Witch, Wicce, Mother Goose "both lively and readily accessible to the general reader."

The controversial thesis underlying Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934–1941 "minimizes Stalin's role in Soviet political life and contends that Stalinism not only had its constructive as well as its murderous side but did not discredit the whole of Soviet-style socialism," according to Roger Draper in the New Leader. In this book Thurston argues against the notion that Joseph Stalin, supreme leader of the Soviet Union from 1929 until his death in 1953, masterminded a campaign of terror incorporating mass arrests, executions, and deportations to subdue a nation in a state of political and social unrest.

Thurston's contention "is that Stalin merely reacted to crises in a confused situation where he was not in total control, and that in any case the Soviet population was not terrorized," explained Geoffrey Hosking in the Journal of Modern History. Thurston's work "is directed against what he terms a 'standard account' of the purges of the 1930s and Stalin's role therein," noted Abbott Gleason in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. "Because he generally credits his opponent(s) with the view that Stalin had a 'plan' to 'terrorize' the country," the critic added, "he devotes an enormous amount of space to demonstrating that Stalin had no plan: 'The terror was too erratic,' he writes, 'to have been a planned operation with the goal of spreading fear.'"

Several reviewers took aim at the revisionist history outlined in Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934–1941. As Draper wrote, "One vital part of Robert Thurston's agenda" is "his insistence on exculpating Stalin by maintaining that he did not plan the Terror—the climactic period of political persecution in 1937 and 1938—and was not responsible for many of its horrors." According to Robert Conquest in the National Review, the historian is "interested in showing that the Terror did not have profound, or long-term, effects on ordinary life. His main themes are that the terror of 1937–38 was not all that pervasive; that the accusa-tions against the victims were rational in terms of Stalin's paranoid character; that Stalin was not directly responsible for much of what happened; that Andrei Vyshinsky was a great legal reformer; and above all, that not many people felt much fear."

Thurston drew strong criticism for his views. "One could read much of the material Thurston quotes and come to conclusions quite different from his," Conquest stated. "Indeed, there is something rather disarming in the author's frequent presenting of facts showing how inhuman the Terror was, sometimes even giving striking evidence against Stalin himself, and then arguing the opposite." Other reviewers noted that Thurston surveys a broad literature on his subject; as Gleason stated, "This book contains material that could have been used to produce a much more subtle inquiry, with many fewer preconceptions and obsessive negative proofs." Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934–1941 "is well researched and documented, and it contains much interesting material," Hosking noted. "But because of its naive picture of human nature and its oversimplification of opponents' views, it fails to contribute much to the ongoing debate on its subject."

Thurston told CA: "I write about history because, to me, thinking about how people behave, how societies function, what political and social power means, and why any system changes is best done by looking at concrete cases in the past. I am less preoccupied by, but still interested in, questions of how we can know anything about history, whether we invent facts rather than find them, and whether what historians do is really different from what writers of fiction do.

"I have always been fascinated by history but became dedicated to it as a career during the Vietnam War. It seemed important then, and now, to study what was at the root of our involvement there, a certain conception of the USSR and 'communism.' I wanted to know what the USSR was like for myself. I still do, although now my interests have broadened to include the mix of popular and state violence in early modern Europe, the American South, and the United States during the McCarthy era."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

English Historical Review, June, 2004, Julian Goodare, review of Witch, Wicce, Mother Goose: The Rise and Fall of the Witch Hunts in Europe and North America, p. 791.

Folklore, August, 2003, Jacqueline Simpson, review of Witch, Wicce, Mother Goose, p. 280.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, summer, 1997, Abbott Gleason, review of Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934–1941, p. 133.

Journal of Modern History, December, 1997, Geoffrey Hosking, review of Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934–1941, p. 897.

National Review, July 15, 1996, Robert Conquest, review of Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934–1941, p. 45.

New Leader, August 12, 1996, Roger Draper, "Spring Time for Hitler—and Stalin," review of Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934–1941, p. 3.

Publishers Weekly, February 26, 1996, review of Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934–1941, p. 93.